sporadic Nintendo griping

Waiting for rain

Don’t know how this landed in my inbox since it wasn’t addressed to me nor Infendo or anyone i know, but the VideoLamer — which i suppose is a softcore(-ish), Intendo-flavored dot com with a dot com — examines the arrid desert Nintendo calls “Q1/Q2”.

Lamer Jay delves into the intricacies of everything, including your requisite comparison (and dismissal) of Wii-to-DS success carryover, the nature of most Wii exclusives (most are franchise spin-offs, others sequels), and the possible repercussions of having this software once the hype fades.

Snippets:

As long as the Wii is a dumping ground for triple A title’s gaidens, Nintendo will have a hard time convincing anyone they have actually learned something from the Gamecube’s mistakes. This may translate to a hard time selling consoles once the hype has died down and gamers are left to choose a console based solely on its software lineup.

These hands-on sports games may be very important at capturing the casual market and if Nintendo has some sense (which it often does not) it will prevent the Wii market from being littered with dozens of lousy sports titles. Casual gamers don’t spend much time reading game reviews and after buying one or two subpar golf sims, they may be permanently turned off.

Depending on your perspective, the large number of small companies working on Wii titles is either exciting or terrifying. Many developers who have never published a game have announced they will be designing for the Wii; this may make the system a dumping ground for amateur garbage, but could just as easily give the Wii a robust lineup of unique games. The challenge Nintendo faces when dealing with small developers is making sure they actually produce. The little guys are often under-funded and over ambitious which is a combination that often leads to vaporware. Possibly vaporware:

Midnight
Orb
Raid over the River
Sadness
Thorn

For the record, all that shit right there is vaporware. I dare you to find one screen for any of em, those Sadness “shots” don’t count.

Midnight, Orb and Thorn are all projects of Crossbeam Studios Entertainment, who have zero releases under their belt. Because attempting to complete a single game just isn’t difficult enough, they have begun preliminary work on Midnight and Thorn while designing Orb. NIBRIS’ Sadness has a lot of people excited and seems somewhat reminiscent of Silicon Knight’s Eternal Darkness. Unfortunately, NIBRIS is also working on Raid over the River simultaneously and has never actually released a game.

Why? I haven’t the slightest. Fans of 3D Realms, perhaps. Must love potential.

very few Wii games have been confirmed for play online. Worse, important publisher Square Enix has publicly derided the Friend Code system Nintendo seems so keen about. For the Wii to compete against the 360 and PS3, it will need better online support and so far Nintendo has done nothing to convince us that the Wii will have this.

Critics have been quick to mention that much of the Wii’s success thus far has been the result of hype, and hype is often empty. What these detractors often fail to recognize is that this hype has put consoles in homes, and developers don’t care why consumers bought a system, they simply want to publish games on systems that many people own. The early success of the Wii has created a band wagon effect and many publishers are jumping on board.

He ends by telling Nintendo, a company that has been successful for the better part of 30 years, how to run their console. The nerve of that guy… Click over to read what’s left of it.

I think Nintendo should de-emphasize their online play features (I think they already are) and leave the connectivity to the pros. Use Wii for party games and single-player adventures, use the 360 for online play.

I bought Wii and i’m sticking to it, till 2008 at least. I can see them easing off online, but they have yet to show me they can make it a single player-accomodating machine while being a party system. Right now i don’t see it. What they shouldn’t have done was name their system “WE” if online (aka, solo multiplayer) wasn’t gonna be part of that equation.

Declaring myself the resident Japanese expert, I can confirm that “wii” does not exist in Japanese. The closest you can get is ウィー, which represents the “wi” sound but is actually more like “uii”, only … different. Like how “tsu” in English is an invention to convey the sound of tsu.